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7/13/2012

Triskaidekaphobia...

…or fear of
Friday the 13th

On days like
today, there is typically some good TV on; usually in the form of horror
flicks. I love horror movies. When I was in my formative years, I was at
once terrified and fascinated by them. The
first one I can remember that scared the shit out of me (and instilled a
healthy fear of scarecrows) was Dark Night of the Scarecrow. It was a made-for-TV movie about
a wrongly accused man who hid in a scarecrow to hide from vigilantes. He was murdered and his spirit returned to
haunt the men who killed them. The last
scene in the movie is of the scarecrow and…let’s just say I didn’t sleep that
night. I watched the movie again last
year and that scene still makes me nervous.

Halloween
came out in 1978 and Friday the 13th came out in 1980.Of course I saw them, and of course they
frightened me.I spent many a night
sitting up in my bed, too scared to sleep because either Jason Voorhees or
Michael Myers was going to come out of the closet and get me.Both of them were effective in their own
way.Jason was a disgusting retarded
hillbilly with a fucked-up face, so he was more gross than anything else.Michael, however, was a tall, silent stalker
in Dickies and an altered white William Shatner mask.You
knew what Jason was, but you weren’t sure about Michael.He looked human, but there was clearly
something other going on behind that
damned façade.It was he that utterly terrified
me, right along with Bubba the Scarecrow.

*takes a moment*

Even now, I can't bear to put an image of Michael up on my blog. That's how it should be done, my friends.

The reason
why this worked so well is because whatever our minds can
conjure is always far worse than what a director can put on the screen. So on
Michael (and Bubba by extension), I could project all of my fears onto that stark…white…mask…and as an imaginative
young writer, believe me when I tell you I had some horrifying monsters I was
seeing instead of a Shatner veneer.

But in spite
of my fears, or maybe because of them, I couldn’t help but devour these
movies. The 80s were a glorious time for
horror, both camp and not. Examples of
some good stuff: Prom Night, The
Shining, Graduation Day, Happy Birthday to Me, The Howling, My Bloody
Valentine, Creepshow, Christine, Cujo, Sleepaway Camp, A Nightmare on Elm
Street, Phenomena, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Phantasm, Child’s Play and The Amityville Horror. This list is not exhaustive, and to be perfectly honest, only the first half of the 80s produced
pristine classics. Or maybe that’s just
because I was younger and far more impressionable then than I was after 1985. Nowadays, it is extremely difficult to pull
off an effective horror movie because our sensibilities are so jaded. I can’t think of the last time a movie made
me uneasy.

I’ll always
love horror movies. I like being curled
up on the couch in the dark, with my hand over my eyes, peeking through the
slits at the TV. I’ve seen Halloween
about 200 times, but the sight of Michael Myers stalking babysitters will
always twerk the primal part of my brain where that petrified little girl still
resides.